2008 Woodie Awards
The Necessity of College: Fact or Fiction?
Pasquale Passarella, Staff Writer
Issue date: 6/23/07Section: Editorials and Opinion
In a generation where going to college has become an inevitability as opposed to the mere possibility it was a few decades ago, questioning the worth of a college education seems almost absurd. Yet, more and more people have begun to do just that.
The issue is not really whether attending college is important. A college degree is unquestionably necessary in the modern American business world. A professional career is pretty much beyond the reach of someone who has not received a Bachelor's degree or higher.
The real center of the heated debate is what going to college really does for students. Experts and students alike have started to consider what is being learned in universities across the nation. Do students even feel like they have learned anything at all?
College classes are meant to be more advanced than those taken in high school or earlier, but this cannot be said of all of them. Many classes are just as basic as high school classes and cover much of the same material. These classes are necessary in some cases, especially considering the diverse education backgrounds of students from different parts of the country or abroad. Yet, someone who has already had courses like these in high school should not be repeating them in college.
This leads to a major issue. There are many students who look only for the easy "A" when making a class schedule. Those who take lower level classes for the sake of a better grade really are not learning anything in the long run.
Another question has to do with the choice of majors. If a person chooses a major such as Philosophy and then pursues a career totally unrelated to the material of that major, such as Medicine, one may be left wondering what the point of those four years spent studying Philosophy was.
However, if a student actually takes an interest in a major and takes the work seriously, even if it is different than the program they go into after undergraduate college, then the time spent taking those courses was worth it. Studying a major that differs from one's intended field of graduate work will give that student a broader educational background, which may actually help him or her to get into the graduate program.
The issue is not really whether attending college is important. A college degree is unquestionably necessary in the modern American business world. A professional career is pretty much beyond the reach of someone who has not received a Bachelor's degree or higher.
The real center of the heated debate is what going to college really does for students. Experts and students alike have started to consider what is being learned in universities across the nation. Do students even feel like they have learned anything at all?
College classes are meant to be more advanced than those taken in high school or earlier, but this cannot be said of all of them. Many classes are just as basic as high school classes and cover much of the same material. These classes are necessary in some cases, especially considering the diverse education backgrounds of students from different parts of the country or abroad. Yet, someone who has already had courses like these in high school should not be repeating them in college.
This leads to a major issue. There are many students who look only for the easy "A" when making a class schedule. Those who take lower level classes for the sake of a better grade really are not learning anything in the long run.
Another question has to do with the choice of majors. If a person chooses a major such as Philosophy and then pursues a career totally unrelated to the material of that major, such as Medicine, one may be left wondering what the point of those four years spent studying Philosophy was.
However, if a student actually takes an interest in a major and takes the work seriously, even if it is different than the program they go into after undergraduate college, then the time spent taking those courses was worth it. Studying a major that differs from one's intended field of graduate work will give that student a broader educational background, which may actually help him or her to get into the graduate program.
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